Category: Seattle magazine

Cops, Crime, criminal justice, Drugs, human services, Seattle magazine

Justice Reform Advocate Behind Successful Diversion Program Wins MacArthur “Genius” Grant

This post originally appeared on Seattle magazine’s website.

Image Credit: Hayley Young, Seattle magazine

Lisa Daugaard, the Seattle criminal justice reform advocate and director of the Public Defender Association (PDA), used to joke with her staff that she would never get a MacArthur grant—the no-strings-attached financial stipend commonly known as the “genius grant.” “It has been kind of an internal joke among my colleagues and family that this would never happen to me, because I had a particularly challenging dynamic with MacArthur over how the work in the [criminal justice] field should progress,” Daugaard says.

So when she got a call from the MacArthur Foundation—several calls, actually, plus a number of increasingly urgent texts—she thought, “I’ll get to this when I get to it.”

Daugaard was preoccupied with a more pressing problem—the latest city budget left the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program underfunded, and the PDA would have to stop taking on new clients starting in early 2020. The city has expanded the program geographically since it first started as a Belltown pilot program in 2005, but resources have not kept up with the expanding need, and the small staff is now “pinned at their desks” by staggering caseloads, Daugaard says. “We’ve been struggling with fairly profound questions about whether LEAD is going to make it in Seattle. … The model will collapse without some recognition that as we build enthusiasm for and willingness to use this model, by definition, we have to grow in capacity.”

So when her phone started ringing, Daugaard says, “I was very preoccupied and grumpy. That morning, I was walking around thinking, ‘I’m kind of done. I don’t think I can fix this.’”

When she finally returned the call, “and then I realized that the only thing they needed to ask me about was whether I would accept this award, it was just one of those moments in one’s life where the thing that you had absolutely, conclusively ruled out as ever possibly happening does happen, and it reminds you that you should probably stop assuming that you know what is possible,” Daugaard says.

LEAD, a joint effort between the PDA, police, and other community stakeholders, is a pre-arrest diversion program that offers alternatives to the criminal justice system for low-level offenders with mental illness and substance use disorders. The program has been shown to be more effective than other approaches at reducing recidivism, reducing arrests by 60 percent compared to other approaches. Versions of LEAD now exist across the country—a testament, supporters say, to the effectiveness of the program.

MacArthur’s process for choosing grant recipients is notoriously secretive. It involves following potential recipients’ work for multiple years and interviewing other people in their orbit to gauge the impact of their work. “The idea that folks who have tried to steer the criminal justice field are feeling confident about this direction was kind of news to me, and very welcome information,” Daugaard says.

She hopes Mayor Jenny Durkan and other city leaders are paying attention. “The people who confer about what direction our field needs to take have decided that this is a very promising direction and that this is not a risk. I hope that that is the takeaway,” she says.

As for what she plans to do with that $625,000 of grant money from the foundation? Daugaard says she’ll figure that out soon—right after she finishes up a couple of big projects, including training 15 organizations from across the U.S. on the LEAD model. “I think in 2020 I will be able to start stepping away and doing some writing” about the theory and practice of LEAD and why it works. She knows the program will go on whether she’s actively engaged on a day-to-day basis or not. “I’m proud and pleased that [LEAD] is not dependent on any one person or any one personality and style,” she says. “I’m really confident that that the same insights will be generated, and the same problem-solving will happen, whether I’m there or not.”

Addiction, Courts, criminal justice, Drugs, Featured, homelessness, Seattle magazine

A New Criminal-Justice Approach That Acknowledges “Addiction Isn’t a Choice”

This story originally appeared in the August issue of Seattle magazine.

On a day in late spring, David Lucas, 26, is standing in front of Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, waiting to find out if he gets to go home.

Lucas (not his real name) has been locked up in the King County Jail in downtown Seattle for nearly a month. Today, he’s facing a charge of trespassing at a grocery store—the same store where he’s been arrested many times, usually for stealing food. He’s been homeless off and (mostly) on for about a dozen years, and has a chronic mental illness that’s been exacerbated by his habit of smoking meth. Unless he can convince Shadid that he’ll stay out of trouble, he could be going back to jail for a while.

Lucas is part of Seattle’s visibly homeless population, the cohort featured in a KOMO-TV special called “Seattle Is Dying,” which aired in the spring. Although this group makes up a small percentage of the city’s overall homeless population, its members commit an outsize percentage of the kind of low-level drug and property crimes—such as shoplifting, trespassing and public urination—that KOMO highlighted in its special, which amplified the conversation about this subset of the homeless population.

Cases like Lucas’ pose a fundamental question: Is the arrest of people with severe addiction and mental illness who break laws a solution to chronic homelessness? Or is patience and compassion a more effective approach?

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Under ordinary circumstances, a judge might look at Lucas’ file—which includes dozens of arrests since 2011—and send him straight back to his cell. But Lucas is no ordinary defendant, and this is no ordinary court session. Like many other clients who sit at the defendants’ table in this courtroom every Wednesday morning, Lucas is supported by a new program that provides case management, legal aid and mental health services to people who, like him, have complex mental health challenges and whose competency to defend themselves in court has been called into question. His advocates this morning include Daniel Garcia, his case manager; Heather Aman, the prosecutorial liaison with the Seattle City Attorney’s Office; and Judge Shadid, who talks at length about the progress Lucas has made.

After a few minutes of deliberation, Shadid decides to release Lucas on the condition that he stay away from the neighborhood where he keeps getting arrested. And when Lucas leaves jail tomorrow, he’ll leave with Garcia, who has been assigned to help him stay on track. He’ll go to sleep tonight not on the street, but in transitional housing, a kind of way station between homelessness and permanent housing. Later in the week, he’ll have an appointment with the occupational therapist who is helping him with the life skills he’ll need to stay out of this courtroom. And his mental health care will be supervised by a team from the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), including a mental health professional who will monitor his progress and adjust his meds if needed.

All of these services are available to Lucas thanks to a $3 million, 18-month expansion of the existing Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, a collaboration between law enforcement agencies, the Public Defender Association and Reach, the street-based case management program for which Garcia works. The expansion, which zeroes in on offenders with mental illness, traumatic brain injuries, addiction and other debilitating cognitive conditions, was funded by a 2018 settlement in a landmark case known simply as Trueblood. The settlement created a pool of money for programs to help defendants at risk of being “warehoused” in jails while they await hearings on their competency to stand trial.

Continue reading “A New Criminal-Justice Approach That Acknowledges “Addiction Isn’t a Choice”” →

campaign finance, City Council, Elections, Seattle magazine

Is Seattle’s Experiment in Public Campaign Finance Working?

This story, which I reported several months ago, just appeared in the July 2019 print edition of Seattle magazine. Many of the numbers have changed; for example, 35 candidates have now qualified for and are receiving democracy vouchers, and of those, 27 have been released from either total spending limits or total contribution limits or both, a process I covered in more detail here. Meanwhile, as I predicted in my piece, independent spending—the primary impediment to the idealistic goals of the democracy voucher program—continues to balloon, outpacing both individual cash donations and democracy vouchers in many races. I’ve lightly edited this version of the story to reflect some of the changes since the story went to print; the version that ran in the magazine is available on Seattle magazine’s website.

This year’s Seattle City Council races have produced a bumper crop of candidates—55 people running for seven council seats. Of those, more than 40 have signed up to participate in the city’s audacious experiment in campaign funding: democracy vouchers, a unique form of public campaign financing in which voters determine who gets public funds.

The goals of the program are twofold: to increase the number and diversity of candidates running in local races; and to make it possible for more ordinary residents, including noncitizens and people who are not registered to vote, to donate directly to candidates even if they lack the personal funds to do so.

Two elections in since the program began in 2017, it’s clear that more candidates are running. In 2015, the first year that most council positions were elected by district (there are seven district and two at-large council seats), the same seven seats drew 41 candidates. And more people than ever before are also contributing to local races. Whether that participation translates into a different kind of city council—one that includes, for example, renters and people without connections to deep-pocketed donors—remains an open question.

First, some history. Four years ago, in an election that was closely watched by voting-reform advocates across the country, Seattle voters passed Initiative 122, which radically changed how city elections are conducted and financed. Although the initiative was sweeping—limiting contributions from city contractors, prohibiting lobbying by former elected officials and lowering contribution limits—the most dramatic change was the creation of an unprecedented financing system that sets aside public money for Seattle residents to spend on candidates for city offices.

Financed through a $30 million, 10-year property tax, the experimental Democracy Voucher Program allocates four “vouchers” worth a total of $100 to every Seattle resident, who can earmark the vouchers to the qualifying candidate or candidates of their choice. Nominees qualify for the program by collecting a specified number of signatures and contributions. (See sidebar.) Once they qualify, candidates also must abide by contribution and spending limits and participate in at least three public forums. The program is voluntary; this year, several candidates, including District 3 (central Seattle) incumbent and socialist Kshama Sawant, are not participating, freeing them from the program’s spending and contribution caps.

In 2015—before the Democracy Voucher Program was in place—only 1.3 percent of Seattle residents donated to local campaigns, most of them residents of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, according to an analysis that year by Sightline Institute, which drafted I-122. In 2017, the first year of the program, that number nearly tripled, to 3.4 percent.

“If your wallet is empty, you’re still able to participate in this part of the political process,” says Liz Dupee, who directs the Washington Democracy Hub at the Win/Win Network, a progressive advocacy group. Last year, a Win/Win analysis found that democracy vouchers had “diversified the pool of donors” to include more young people, people of color and residents of less affluent neighborhoods.

District 2 City Council candidate Tammy Morales, who narrowly lost to incumbent Bruce Harrell in her first run for the southeast Seattle seat in 2015, says democracy vouchers have been a game changer for her. “The last time I ran, I would knock on somebody’s door who might feel very compelled by my message and the things I was hoping to do, but I wasn’t about to ask them for a contribution because they couldn’t afford it, and now I can ask them for their vouchers,” Morales says. “They’re providing a way for people who don’t have a lot of resources to participate.”

Other studies back this up. A city-commissioned report by BerkConsulting found that 88 percent of people who used vouchers in 2017 had never contributed to a local campaign before.

So far, vouchers haven’t made campaigns cheaper. In 2017—the first year that City Council candidates could participate in the voucher program—Position 8 candidates Jon Grant and Teresa Mosqueda spent a combined total of $818,000, making the race one of the most expensive council races in recent Seattle history. Both Grant and Mosqueda participated in the Democracy Voucher Program, but the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (which has the discretion to do so) raised the cap on individual contributions from $250 to $500 and lifted the total spending limit for both candidates after Mosqueda’s fundraising repeatedly blew past Grant’s.

In 2017, when just two council seats were on the ballot, spending for City Council campaigns increased 60 percent over 2015, when all nine seats were up for election.

If one of the goals of the program is to make campaigns less expensive, it may seem counterintuitive to raise the caps. But Ethics and Elections Commission executive director Wayne Barnett argues that it’s important for campaigns to have the ability to combat well-funded outside groups—in other words, political action committees (PACs), which are not subject to contribution or spending limits. “If you’re not going to give a candidate an opportunity to remain competitive when outside forces start spending heavily on behalf of their opponent, I don’t think candidates are likely to remain in the [Democracy Voucher] program.”

Morales, who announced her candidacy in January, says the spending caps can make it hard to pay campaign workers a living wage while also budgeting for expenses like ads and campaign mail. And Mosqueda notes that the cap on democracy vouchers made it impossible for people who wanted to contribute to her campaign to do so after she hit the $300,000 maximum for voucher contributions. “We need to either say that we need to stay within these caps or get rid of them,” Mosqueda says. “There were a lot of people [last year] who were very frustrated that they couldn’t use their democracy vouchers.” Two-thirds of Mosqueda’s campaign funding in 2017 came from democracy vouchers.

It’s also unclear whether democracy vouchers are accomplishing their second goal: producing a larger, higher-quality and more diverse field of local candidates. Much has been made of the sheer number of people running for the City Council this year. But most of them are white and wealthier than average; according to financial disclosure statements (which, thanks to I-122, now include each candidate’s net wealth), 15 of this year’s candidates have a net worth of over $1 million, and only a handful are people of color.

Candidates who want to participate in the voucher program aren’t guaranteed funding. Before they can receive any vouchers, they have to collect a minimum number of signatures (400 in citywide races; 150 for each district council seat) and get donations of at least $10 from an equal number of registered voters.

In 2017, when the two citywide seats were on the ballot, the candidates were required to get signatures and donations from the same 400 people, a requirement that 2017 candidate Hisam Goueli says forced him to spend most of his time chasing contributions and signatures rather than meeting with voters. “We believed in the Democracy Voucher Program; we were just broken by it,” Goueli says. “We were devastated to find out the program we thought would be the thing that helped us get our message out would be the hamstring to the campaign.” The rule has since been changed. Voucher candidates still have to get a minimum number of signatures and contributions, but the signatures and contributions can now come from different people.

On the plus side, Alex Pedersen, a candidate in northeast Seattle’s District 4, says the signature requirement (and the limitations imposed by the voucher program itself) gives a leg up to candidates who are willing to engage with voters face-to-face. “Even those [candidates] accustomed to using social media are now required to put on their walking shoes and knock on doors, which I think will help to build greater trust between the people and their elected officials and make politics more fun and engaging,” Pedersen says.

Candidates who have declined to participate in the Democracy Voucher Program give various reasons for their decision. At her January kickoff for reelection, council member Sawant, the District 3 incumbent, said that she expected to have “probably a million [dollars] thrown at this race” by “corporate PACs and big business lobbyists and big developers,” and would need to raise and spend more money than the voucher program would allow.

Ari Hoffman, who’s running in District 2, opposes the voucher program for philosophical reasons. “I made the decision at the beginning of the campaign not to take democracy vouchers, because I do not believe that taxpayer money should be used to finance political campaigns,” Hoffman says. “My campaign is about fiscal accountability in our local governments, and I would be a hypocrite if I took taxpayer money to fund it.”

And Naveed Jamali, who’s running in District 7 (downtown, Magnolia and Queen Anne), says he prefers to focus on policy rather than “chasing vouchers”; when he knocks on people’s doors, he says, “the first question is about ‘What issues are important to you?’ It’s not about making the sale.”

Seattle’s Democracy Voucher Program is still very new, and proponents say they’re well aware of its shortcomings and that it wouldn’t be surprising if the program—assuming it continues—receives some fine-tuning in the future. But Margaret Morales, a researcher with Sightline, notes that no amount of tinkering can fix what many reform advocates consider the most troubling trend in recent years: the growing impact of independent spending, which totaled more than $1 million in 2017. To change that, Morales and other voucher proponents note, will require overturning the Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which opened the floodgates for unlimited spending by political action committees. In the meantime, Morales says, candidates “just have to do the best they can regardless of independent expenditures.”

 

Democracy Vouchers 101 

Candidates for Seattle offices who file all the required paperwork can choose to participate in the Democracy Voucher Program.To be eligible for vouchers*, candidates for the City Council’s district positions must:

• Collect signatures from 150 Seattle residents (including from at least 75 in their district)
• Collect at least $10 from 150 residents (including from at least 75 in their district; the financial contributions and signatures do not need to come from the same people).

• Limit their campaign valuation—the total amount of money raised or spent—to $75,000 in the primary election and $75,000 in the general election.

Additionally, candidates accepting democracy vouchers must:

• Adhere to an individual contribution cap of $250 (the cap for candidates not accepting democracy vouchers is $500).

• Not collect any more vouchers once they have reached their total campaign valuation cap.

Candidates—both those who accept vouchers and those who choose not to—can appeal to the Seattle Ethics and Election Commission to have the caps on fundraising and expenditures raised.

*The required number of signature, dollar amounts, and spending and contribution caps vary depending on whether a candidate is running for a district council seat, an at-large council seat or another elected city office. 

Addiction, Health, Seattle magazine

Tech Addiction Is On the Rise In Seattle—But Why?
Photo by Hayley Young for Seattle magazine

This article appeared in the June 2019 issue of Seattle magazine and was produced in collaboration with Crosscut. A full version of this piece is available at Seattle magazine’s website. 

Laura and Dave Johnson* had always known that their older son, Eric, was different than other kids. Diagnosed with severe ADHD at a young age, Eric was smart, sensation-seeking and focused—the kind of kid, his mother says, who has “a brain for coding,” and is “smart in a way that we don’t understand yet.”

If he wasn’t racing his mountain bike downhill, he was bouncing parkour-style off the sides of downtown buildings or watching television with an intensity that unnerved his parents. “He could watch TV all day long,” says Laura Johnson.

Then, like most of his peers, Eric discovered video games—Mario Kart, Splatoon (a third-person game in which players splatter each other with ink), The Legend of Zelda. After that, Johnson says, things were never the same. Unlike most kids and adults who play video games, Eric, now 15, didn’t seem to have an “off” switch. By the time he was in middle school, games were all he could think about. It was like the games were doing the same thing for him that mountain biking did, Johnson says. “He likes that tactile [sensation] and he needs his brain to go fast and he needs feedback from something.”

The Johnsons live in a comfortable brick Tudor in Seattle’s Broadview neighborhood. There’s one TV in their house and just two computers: a desktop in the basement that Dave uses for work and Laura’s laptop. The idea that video games could become a problem, much less an addiction, was completely alien to them. Over time, though, they began to realize that their son’s fascination with games and other screens resembled an addiction. “He rushes through other things if he knows there’s ‘game time’ in his future,” she says. “And that ‘game time’ is on his mind [until] he gets it—regardless of what we are doing.”

While gaming—or tech—addiction is uncommon (and the label “addiction” remains controversial), Eric is not alone. Dr. Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, estimates that between 5 and 12 percent of young adults show signs of gaming disorder; a 2017 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry, meanwhile, put the number at less than 1 percent of the general population.

Games (and social media such as Instagram and Twitter) have an additional characteristic that makes them habit-forming: They provide that kick of dopamine at unpredictable intervals, providing an incentive to stay glued to the screen.

The jury is still out on whether tech addiction is more prevalent in places like Seattle, where a higher-than-average number of people work in the tech industry, but anecdotal evidence suggests there could be a correlation. Hilarie Cash, the founder of a Fall City–based inpatient tech addiction treatment program called ReStart, says that when she started treating people for gaming disorder, back in the mid-1990s, most of her patients were adults working in the tech industry; today, she says, many of her clients have parents who work in the industry and who “tend to be very surprisingly oblivious to the impacts of screens on child development.”

Experts generally agree that too much screen time can inhibit kids’ ability to focus, develop social skills and engage in activities that don’t produce an immediate reward the way screens do. Cash also points to school districts in large, highly connected cities that, she says, have “drunk the Kool-Aid and are trying to get tablets and computers in the hands of every student, even in elementary school.”

In recent years, there has been significant interest in recognizing gaming disorder as a formal diagnosis, spurred largely by an international uptick in people seeking treatment for the disorder. Last year, the World Health Organization officially recognized gaming disorder as a condition in its International Classification of Diseases, and the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), has recognized “internet gaming disorder” as a “condition for further study” for possible future inclusion in what’s often called the bible of psychiatry. The state of research remains in its infancy, however, and experts disagree on everything from the best course of treatment to whether compulsive gaming should be classified as an “addiction” at all.

For the Johnsons, their attempts to curtail Eric’s obsession with gaming began by trying to restrict his access to technology. They established boundaries, one after the other—no games until he’d done something creative, or no more than an hour of gaming a day—but Eric broke every rule. “I tried so many different scenarios,” Johnson says. “No boundaries ever worked. Nothing ever worked.”

Over the course of Eric’s seventh-grade year, this “very smart, very savvy…fascinating” kid transformed into a person his parents barely recognized—a kid who spent all his time “speedrunning” (playing through games as fast as possible) and throwing fits when his parents tried to restrict his access to games. “He would run away,” Johnson recalls. “He jumped out of the car once while it was moving.” After the Johnsons took away his smartphone, Eric stole money from his brother, who is three years younger, got off the bus on the way to school and bought a second phone. (Then, when they took that phone away, he did it again.)

Over the course of Eric’s seventh-grade year, this “very smart, very savvy…fascinating” kid transformed into a person his parents barely recognized—a kid who spent all his time “speedrunning” (playing through games as fast as possible) and throwing fits when his parents tried to restrict his access to games.

At their wits’ end, the Johnsons sought advice from Ann Steel, a counselor who specializes in gaming addiction. Following her advice, they sent Eric to a wilderness camp on the Olympic Peninsula—an increasingly common, if still unproven method of treating kids whose gaming or screen time starts to negatively impact their lives—shortly before his 13th birthday. On his final night before he left for camp, Eric stole his mom’s laptop and stayed up all night surfing the web, like someone getting a last fix before going to rehab. After 10 weeks in the wilderness, Johnson says, Eric “did seem clearer in his head.” On the other hand, the day after he returned, he broke Johnson’s windshield.

Last year, after doing more research about its options and hiring an education consultant, the family sent Eric to Cherry Gulch, a therapeutic boarding school outside of Boise, Idaho, that offers individualized education and treatment to kids struggling with various issues, from grief to ADHD to digital addiction. Johnson says her son is doing well. After a year at Cherry Gulch, she says, “his growth has been huge. The most growth we’ve had in his 15 years of life.”

Still, it’s unclear what his parents will do when Eric graduates from Cherry Gulch this summer, and how they’ll keep him from slipping back into his old habits when he returns. He’s just coming to terms with the fact that he has an addiction to gaming and screens, Johnson says. “He isn’t quite at the acceptance phase.”

The notion that it’s possible to be addicted to video games, or any type of technology, has gained mainstream acceptance in recent years. Like gambling—the only behavioral addiction currently included in the DSM—video games seem to trigger some of the same chemicals in the brain as alcohol and illicit drugs, including dopamine, the so-called “reward neurotransmitter” of the brain. But games (and social media such as Instagram and Twitter) have an additional characteristic that makes them habit-forming: They provide that kick of dopamine at unpredictable intervals, providing an incentive to stay glued to the screen.

Think of it as a lab experiment, says Christakis. “If you try to condition a rodent to push a lever when a stimulus comes, and they get a reward every time, it doesn’t create an obsession,” Christakis says. Make the rewards unpredictable, and the rats are “much more likely to become compulsive. The reward could come at any second, and they might miss it if they aren’t paying attention.”

Gaming also gives people something of value that they may be missing in their lives—whether a person is a smart kid craving stimulus and mental challenges, like Eric, or an adult who lacks a sense of accomplishment in life. Alok Kanojia, a Boston psychiatrist who specializes in gaming disorders and says he was once addicted to video games himself, says, “People will play 40, 60, 100 hours of World of Warcraft”—a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO, in which people cooperate and compete with each other in real time— “and they derive a sense of value out of it. You may feel like you’re no one in the real world, but you’re someone in the game.”

Read the rest of this story at Seattle magazine.

Affordability, homelessness, housing, Seattle magazine, State of Washington

What Eviction Reform Means for You

This piece originally appeared on Seattle magazine’s website.

Last month, the Washington state legislature passed a sweeping eviction reform bill that gives tenants more time to pay rent before they can be evicted; gives judges new discretion when deciding whether to give tenants more time to pay or how much to penalize evicted tenants financially; and creates new financial incentives for landlords to rent to tenants using financial subsidies.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Nicole Macri, was a response to the problems outlined in a report by the Seattle Women’s Commission, “Losing Home,” earlier this year. That report revealed that tenants in Seattle are frequently evicted for failing to pay extremely small amounts of rent (as little as a few dollars), and that the county superior court judges—who determine whether tenants will be evicted—have little discretion to consider mitigating factors (like a one-time medical emergency) that cause people to fall temporarily behind on their rent. In a story about King County’s eviction court for the February 2019 print edition of Seattle magazine, one woman described receiving an eviction notice while in the hospital for late-stage kidney disease. Another case, described by Housing Justice Project attorney Edmund Witter, involved a man who was hospitalized for a degenerative spinal disease; the landlord refused to allow HJP to pay his rent because HJP was not the tenant.

The legislation makes several statewide reforms:

  • It increases the number of days a tenant has to pay his or her rent once a landlord puts a “pay or vacate” notice on their door from 3 days to 14.
  • It gives judges the ability to consider mitigating circumstances when a tenant falls behind on their rent, such as unanticipated one-time expenses, a history of timely payments, and hardship to the tenant if they’re evicted. This provision also allows tenants to negotiate payment plans with landlords.
  • It requires landlords to put any payments a tenant does make toward rent first, rather than toward fees the landlord has charged the tenant for paying late. The “Losing Home” report found that late fees often added hundreds of dollars to tenants’ arrears, often outstripping the original amount they owed.
  • It limits the amount of attorneys’ fees judges can award to landlords, which were previously unlimited.
  • It expands an existing program that reimburses landlords for damages caused by tenants using rent subsidies. If a judge uses his or her new discretion to forgive rent or give a tenant more time to pay, and the reason is that the tenant is low-income or experiencing hardship, a landlord can now petition the Department of Commerce for reimbursement for that loss.
  • And it requires that 14-day eviction notices be written in simple language (and offered online in 10 different languages) so that tenants understand what is happening and how to respond.

The legislation is now on Governor Jay Inslee’s desk, and will become law (if Inslee doesn’t get around to signing it) on May 22.

City Council, Density, Development, Equity, housing, Seattle magazine, Urbanism, zoning

After Five Years, Seattle’s Scaled-Back Density Plan Moves Forward
Seattle's density plan gets a green light
Image credit: iStock

This post originally appeared on Seattle magazine’s website.

After almost five years, dozens of hearings, hundreds of public comments, multiple legal challenges, and enough environmental and legal analysis to fill a small apartment, the Seattle City Council is finally poised to pass the citywide Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) plan, which has been in the works, as part of the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, since 2014.

The city council passed the plan out of committee on a unanimous 8-0 vote last Monday, February 25, a fact that is remarkable in itself. The council spent hours debating some final nuances of the legislation (and ultimately rolled back upzones in some areas), but all nine council members fundamentally agreed on the overall goal of building more housing, including affordable housing, throughout the city—a notable turnaround from just four and a half years ago, when a Seattle Times story on a leaked draft of the plan sparked so much backlash that then-mayor Ed Murray decided to scale back the proposal.

MHA allows developers to build taller, denser residential and commercial buildings in the city’s multifamily and commercial areas and urban villages—neighborhood centers, typically located along major arterial streets, that have long been designated for future growth because of their proximity to transit, jobs, and services. It also expands some of those urban villages to allow second houses, townhomes, duplexes, and small apartment buildings on about 6 percent of the land that is currently zoned exclusively for detached single-family houses.

The rest of the city’s single-family areas, which occupy about 75 percent of the city’s developable residential land, will be untouched by the changes. This was a major point of contention during the MHA deliberations. Urbanists pointed to Seattle’s history of redlining and studies showing that exclusive single-family zoning perpetuates racial and income inequality to argue that the city should get rid of single-family zoning altogether.

In exchange for greater density, developers are required to build or pay into a fund to build housing that is affordable to people making less than 60 percent of the Seattle median income—currently $48,150 for a family of two. The city hopes that MHA will result in 6,000 units of new low-income housing over the next 10 years. The plan has already been partially implemented—six neighborhoods, including downtown, South Lake Union, and the University District—were upzoned two years ago. The legislation the council has been considering for much of the last year concerns the rest of the city.

The plan, on the whole, is modest, and its impacts won’t be visible right away. In most places, it bumps land up just one or two zoning designations—allowing two-story stacked flats, for example, in areas where only townhouses are allowed today, or raising the maximum height for apartment buildings from 30 feet to 40. It also restricts most of the biggest changes to major arterials, which already tend to be pretty dense. And since many of the changes in MHA are subtle (houses built under a new type of zoning called Residential Small Lot, for example, may be virtually indistinguishable from houses built under the previous zoning), people living in single-family areas that get upzoned might not even notice the difference.

The city has prevailed against legal challenges to the plan so far. The most recent of these was in November, when a city hearing examiner ruled against neighborhood activists who claimed the city didn’t do a sufficient environmental analysis of the proposal. But the final legislation does include a “clawback” provision, supported by MHA opponents and sponsored by West Seattle council member Lisa Herbold. It states the council’s intent to invalidate any upzones implemented under the plan if a court finds MHA’s affordability requirements invalid in the future.

This was another point of contention. Opponents said including the clawback provision in the bill was an invitation to lawsuits, while proponents argued that the provision ensured that developers wouldn’t get “something for nothing”—that is, if a court ruled against the city’s affordable-housing requirement, they wouldn’t be allowed to build denser housing anyway.

The full council is expected to approve the final MHA plan on March 18.